Hello from Ohio, USA!

gutsy

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Hi! I'm Todd and I'm in southwest Ohio in the United States. Came across your videos and absolutely love them, it's neat to see how things grown down under. My grandmother is from Australia, but she was a city girl (Sydney, go Rabbitohs!) so she doesn't have insights on gardening there. This is my first season trying to be as self sufficient as possible, our new house just has a bunch of overgrown landscaping and about an acre, so my goal is to make all of our planters full of edible plants along with the gardens set up in the parts of the yard that actually get sun (lots of trees in our back yard). I'm also starting a couple of mushroom patches to see how that goes. Looking forward to this forum!
 

gutsy

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Welcome Todd.

What type of mushrooms are you planning to grow? It's something I've wanted to try, but it's just too hot & dry here!

I'm growing a bed of wine caps, trying a bed of morels (not hopeful about those, they're really hard and i'm a newbie), and then on my logs I'm growing shiitake, lion's mane and oyster mushrooms. I've never done any of this and I'm fully prepared to fail....but inoculating the logs sure was fun!
 

ClissAT

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Welcome Gutsy! I don't mind a bit of star wars myself if that's where that photo comes from!

You must have special soil to be able to grow mushrooms out in the open under trees like that.

Hey Andrew, here in SE qld we have heaps of mushie farms that supply shops. I used to get compost from one farm that throws its gates/doors open every Friday for people to come by and help themselves at $1bag. I had to be quick because the bags went in an hour.
Most of the mushrooms I buy at iga are fairly local. It never occurred to me there were some places that didn't have access to fresh local mushrooms.
 

AndrewB

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The standard white ones are sometimes Australian grown, but anything else is pretty rare. I've seen local Shiitake once. Mushrooms are fantastic at absorbing chemicals & pollution. There are actually some species being studied for use in industrial cleanup.

This means you want to grow them in the cleanest environment possible to avoid passing on the bad stuff when you eat them.
 

ClissAT

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How interesting Andrew!

Something I learnt about them is to get the biggest field mushies, slice thinly, lay on cake racks so the gills get the sun and because they are still alive, they will manufacture Vit K.

Leave in the sun to dry to leather stage for the rest of the day, pack into glass jars with good lid and store in fridge.
Always fresh, full of VitK, ready to soak and cook with for a year. Also use the soaking water.

I found it best to do that on those long sunny dry days of very low humidity in spring. Up here our humidity gets down to below 40% which is good for drying mushies. The more full sun on them the better apparently.

If I have other surplus fruit and veg I'll slice thinly and lay it out too.
 

Mark

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Hi Todd and welcome mate!

Mushrooms are an interesting subject... I did some "mushroom foraging" over Christmas when visiting the in-laws down south in Bowral NSW and when I say "foraging" I mean I had no clue what I was doing and was unsuccessful.

However, my father-in-law knows what he's looking for and because he found a few nice mushies along the roadside it inspired me to go look around myself but all I got was a nasty bite from a bull ant that jumped up and bit me on the shin!

It got me thinking about mushroom foraging and the dangers of misidentification so I am working on a short video (probably a mid-weeker) with my thoughts on the subject.

Cheers :)
 

OskarDoLittle

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When I was a kid (grew up in Tassie) I remember my folks picking field mushrooms (but the climate is probably more suited down there then here in Qld) - I’d kinda forgotten you could grow them in fields rather than bags. I’ve been a dismal failure with mushrooms - I’ve tried boxes, logs and boards...the boxes were the best but require persistent misting to keep them damp - we went away for a week and the box seemed to die off - couldn’t revive it at all after we got home so the mushie compost just went into the garden. I hope Todd that you have waaaaay more success than me!!
 
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